Harrietta Lee, or Harry, is a witch excommunicated from the magical community due to a checkered past and a lot of baggage. Her main goal is to make rent on time with by using what magic she has left to help people. One of these people is Tristan, an apprentice of the famous Meresti family, whose leader is Miriam, a former friend and part of Harry’s baggage. He lost a very important object and…
Content Warning: This review contains spoilers, but only specifics about the world, nothing plot-specific past the first chapter. I knew almost nothing about this book when I started reading it, and it was such a pleasure to be surprised, so if you like vampire stories, or Octavia Butler, I highly recommend it and you can stop reading this review now and just go pick up the book. The opening of…
What if the African natives developed steam power ahead of their colonial oppressors? What might have come of Belgium’s disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier?
Fabian Socialists from Great Britain join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo’s “owner,” King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated.
Shawl’s speculative masterpiece manages to turn one of the worst human rights disasters on record into a marvelous and exciting exploration of the possibilities inherent in a turn of history. Everfair is told from a multiplicity of voices: Africans, Europeans, East Asians, and African Americans in complex relationships with one another, in a compelling range of voices that have historically been silenced. Everfair is not only a beautiful book but an educational and inspiring one that will give the reader new insight into an often ignored period of history.
(from Bookshop)
Alternate
histories are a funny thing. Often they’re fun, but when used correctly they
can be so much more than that. They can cause us to re-examine our own biases
and look at their origins. They can make us question what knowledge we take for
granted as being the simple truth and what we have never considered to be lies.
In Everfair,
one of these key questions is that of land ownership and who really belongs to
a nation. Nisi Shawl takes this question, a question at the heart of the fight
against Leopold II and the Belgians, and she builds something grand. Shawl
builds an epic that hits at the heart of these issues without sacrificing the
emotional centre that is the lives of the characters she’s writing about.
In this collection of short stories, Carmen Maria Machado does what skilled horror writers do best: she examines real-world beliefs through a lens that highlights that real horror isn’t monsters, but our own societies.
Lucky is a lesbian, but in her conservative Sri Lankan family, that’s not an option. She married her gay friend Kris and they go to gay bars, have lovers, and still have the approval and conditional love of their family. When her grandmother falls and Lucky has to move back home to help take care of her, the lies become harder and more pressing. Then, Lucky’s childhood sweetheart Nisha is getting married, and Lucky wants to save her. She’s trapped in the obligations of a family that has many of its own problems–her father divorced her mother for her best friend, her sister entered an arranged marriage she didn’t want but seems happy, and her other sister ran away. Lucky wants to escape this life of duty without happiness, but how can she leave her family behind?
I have had Dread Nation in my TBR list for a while. After Deathless Dividewas released, I was even more pressed to check out this duology, even though YA stories about zombies are not exactly something I would normally read. The premise was just too good—after the dead rise during the American Civil War, Native and Black American kids are taken from their families and forced into an education…
I just finished The Priory, when I started it I couldn't put it down. It's easily become my new favorite novel. I've seen so few books that are about QPOC like me and this finally gives me characters I can relate to. Just wanted to thank you for sharing this with us, I'm excited to see what you make next!!
200 years after Cinderella’s death, the kingdom that she used to live in has become a dystopia. When girls turn 16, they are forced to attend a ball, where the men of the kingdom choose which girl they want to be their wife. Any girl that doesn’t get chosen by the time they’re 18 is taken away, never to be seen again. Main character Sophia doesn’t want to go through any of this for all of the obvious reasons, and also because she’s gay and in love with her childhood friend.
